Boeing’s 737 Crash, Tesla’s Model Y, and More News This Week

Here at WIRED Transportation, we get to write about all sorts of stuff. Self-driving cars. Hyperloops. Bike lane design. Subway maps. The occasional man dressed up as a car seat for an apparently legitimate purpose. You get the idea. So it’s rare when a mere one or two topics dominate our pages for an entire week. But that’s what happened over the past seven days.

Meanwhile, we tracked the goings on of our good friend Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO started his week by continuing his tangle with the SEC, which has asked a federal judge to hold him in contempt. Musk’s lawyers defended his latest questionable tweets as free speech (among other arguments). Later in the week, Musk shifted his attention to showing off Tesla’s latest creation: the Model Y. We covered the Thursday night unveil live, broke down all the news, and stacked the new baby SUV against its electric competition.

It has truly been a whopper of a week. Let’s get you caught up.

Headlines

Stories you might have missed from WIRED this week

Pivot of the Week

And now for something a little lighter. Please observe the embodied spirit of New York City public transit: One enterprising passenger attempts to board the subway with (what appears to be) a solid steel beam.

Stat of the Week

18,089,503

The number of flight hours served by US-certified airlines in 2017 (the most recent data we have) without a fatal accident. A good reminder that despite the occasional crash, flying is incredibly safe.

Required Reading

News from elsewhere on the internet

Self-driving cars are the future, but it’s never too early to document their past. The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation has acquired a first-generation, self-driving Chevrolet Bolt developed by Cruise, General Motors’ autonomy unit. It’s now on display, next to a 1959 Cadillac El Dorado.

What happens in Vegas? The city’s Convention and Visitors Authority’s board of directors voted to approve construction of a small underground tunnel system, to be built by Elon Musk’s Boring Company.

Self-driving delivery company Nuro has arrived in Texas. The startup has been working with Kroger, using its human-free bots to deliver groceries in Arizona since last summer, and now the duo have expanded their operation to Houston.

Shared e-scooter company Bird has laid off about 40 employees, some 4 to 5 percent of its workforce, according to The Information. “We spent a lot of time in 2018 scaling around the world as quickly as possible. The winter has given us a great opportunity to actually take a step back and really focus on unit economics of the business,” CEO Travis VanderZanden told the outlet.